down town,-husband of Mrs. Potiphar,— and father of Master Frederic ditto. Per contra; I shall never be in love again,— in getting my fortune I have lost my real life, my house is dreary,-Mrs. Potiphar is not Lucy Lamb,-and Master Frederic -is a good boy.

The game is all up for me, and yet I trust I have good feeling enough left to sympathize with those who are still playing. I see girls as lovely and dear as any of which poets have sung,-as fresh as dew-drops and beautiful as morning. I watch their glances, and understand them better than they know, for they do not dream that "old Potiphar" does any thing more than pay Mrs. P.'s bills. I see the youths nervous about neckcloths, and anxious that their hair shall be parted straight behind. I see them all wear the same tie, the same trowsers, the same boots. I hear them all say the same thing, and dance with the same partners in the same way. I see them go to Europe and return, I hear them talk slang to show that they have exhausted human life in foreign parts, and observe them demean themselves according to their idea of the English nobleman. I watch them go in strongly for being "manly," and " smashing the spoonies,"-asserting intimacies with certain uncertain women in Paris, and proving it by their treatment of ladies at home. I see them fuddle themselves on fine wines and talk like cooks, play heavily and lose, and win, and pay, and drink, and maintain a conservative position in politics, denouncing "Uncle Tom's Cabin," as a false and fanatical tract; and declaring that our peculiar institutions are our own affair, and that John Bull had better keep his eyes at home to look into his coal mines. I see this vigorous fermentation subside, and much clear character deposited, and, also, much life and talent muddled for ever.

It is whimsical, because this absurd spectacle is presented by manikins who are made of the same clay as Plutarch's heroes, because, deliberately, they prefer cabbages to roses. I am not at all angry with them. On the contrary, when they dance well I look on with pleasure. Man ought to dance, but he ought to do something else, too. All genial gentlemen in all ages have danced. Who quarrels with dancing? Ask Mrs. Potiphar if I ever objected to it. But then, people must dance at their own risk. If Lucy Lamb, by dancing with young Boosey when he is tipsy, shows that she has no self-respect, how can I, coolly talking with Mrs. Lamb in the corner, and gravely looking on, respect the young lady? Lucy tells me that if she dances with James she VOL. I.--42

must with John. I cannot deny it, for 1 am not sufficiently familiar with the regu lations of the mystery. Only this; if dancing with sober James makes it necessary to dance with tipsy John,-it seems to me, upon a hasty glance at the subject, that a self-respecting Lucy would refrain from the dance with James. Why it should be so, I cannot understand. Why Lucy must dance with every man who asks her, whether he is in his senses, or knows how to dance, or is agreeable to her or not, is a profound mystery to Paul Potiphar. Here is a case of woman's wrongs, decidedly. We men cull the choicest partners, make the severest selections, and the innocent Lucys gracefully submit. Lucy loves James, and a waltz with him (as P. P. knows very well from experience) is "a little heaven below" to both. Now, dearest Lucy, why must you pay the awful penance of immediately waltzing with John, against whom your womanly instinct rebels? And yet the laws of social life are so stern, that Lucy must make the terrible decision, whether it is better to waltz with James or worse to waltz with John! "Whether," to put it strongly with Father Jerome, "heaven is pleasanter than hell is painful."

I say that I watch these graceful gamesters, without bitter feeling. Sometimes it is sad to see James woo Lucy, win her, marry her, and then both discover that they have made a mistake. I don't see how they could have helped it; and when the world, that loves them both so tenderly, holds up its pure hands of horror. why, Paul Potiphar goes quietly home to Mrs. P., who is dressing for Lucy's ball. and says nothing. He prefers to retire into his private room, and his slippers, and read the last number of Bleak House, or a chapter in Vanity Fair. If Mrs. Potiphar catches him at the latter, she is sure to say:

"There it is again; always reading those exaggerated sketches of society. Odious man that he is. I am sure he never knew a truly womanly woman."

"Polly, when he comes back in September I'll introduce him to you," is the only answer I have time to make, for as it is already half past ten, Mrs. P. must be off to the ball.

I know that our set is not the world, nor the country, nor the city. I know that the amiable youths who are in league tó crush spooneyism are not many, and well I know, that in our set (I mean Mrs. P.'s) there are hearts as noble and characters as lofty as in any time and in any land. And yet, as the father of a family (viz. Frederic, our son), I am constrained to believe that our social tendency is to

the wildest extravagance. Here, for instance, is my house. It cost me fifty-five thousand dollars. It is superbly furnished. Mrs. P. and I don't know much about such things. She was only stringent for buhl, and the last Parisian models, So we delivered our house into the hands of certain eminent upholsterers to be furnished, as we send Frederic to the tailor's to be clothed. To be sure, I asked what proof we had that the upholsterer was possessed of taste. But Mrs. P. silenced me, by saying that it was his business to have taste, and that a man who sold furniture, naturally knew what was handsome and proper for my house.

The furnishing was certainly performed with great splendor and expense. My drawing-rooms strongly resemble the warehouse of an ideal cabinet-maker. Every whim of table-every caprice of chair and sofa, is satisfied in those rooms. There are curtains like rainbows, and carpets, as if the curtains had dripped all over the floor. There are heavy cabinets of carved walnut, such as belong in the heavy wainscotted rooms of old palaces, set against my last French pattern of wall paper. There are lofty chairs, like the thrones of archbishops in Gothic cathedrals, standing by the side of the elaborately gilded frames of mirrors. Marble

statues of Venus and the Apollo support my mantels, upon which or molu Louis Quatorze clocks ring the hours. In all possible places there are statues, statuettes, vases, plates, teacups, and liquorcases. The wood-work, when white, is elaborated in Moresco carving-when oak and walnut, it is heavily moulded. The contrasts are pretty, but rather sudden. In truth, my house is a huge curiosityshop of valuable articles,-clustered without taste, or feeling, or reason. They are .there, because my house was large and I was able to buy them; and because, as Mrs. P. says, one must have buhl and or molu, and new forms of furniture, and do as well as one's neighbors, and show that one is rich, if he is so. They are there, in fact, because I couldn't help it. I didn't want them, but then I don't know what I did want. Somehow I don't feel as if I had a home, merely because orders were given to the best upholsterers and fancy-men in town to send a sample of all their wares to my house. To pay a morning call at Mrs. Potiphar's is, in some ways, better than going shopping. You see more new and costly things in a shorter time. People say, What a love of a chair!" "What a darling table!" What a heavenly sofa!" and they all go and tease their husbands to get things precisely like them. When Kurz Pacha,

the Sennaar minister, came to a dinner at my house, he said:

"Bless my soul! Mr. Potiphar, your house is just like your neighbor's."

I know it. I am perfectly aware that there is no more difference between my house and Croesus's, than there is in twe ten-dollar bills of the same bank. He might live in my house and I in his, without any confusion. He has the same curtains, carpets, chairs, tables, Venuses. Apollos, busts, vases, &c. And he goes into his room, and thinks it's all a devilish bore, just as I do. We have each got to refurnish every few years, and, therefore, have no possible opportunity for attaching ourselves to the objects about us. Unfortunately Kurz Pacha particularly detested precisely what Mrs. P. most liked. because it is the fashion to like them. I mean the Louis Quatorze and the Louis Quinze things.

Taste, dear Mrs. Potiphar," said the Pacha," was a thing not known in the days of those kings. Grace was entirely supplanted by grotesqueness, and now, instead of pure and beautiful Greek forms. we must collect these hideous things. If you are going backward to find models. why not go as far as the good ones? My dear madam, an or molu Louis Quatorze clock would have given Pericles a fit. Your drawing-rooms would have thrown Aspasia into hysterics. Things are not beautiful because they cost money; nor is any grouping handsome without harmony. Your house is like a woman dressed in Ninon de l'Enclos's bodice, with Queen Anne's hooped skirt, who limps in Chinese shoes, and wears an Elizabethan ruff round her neck, and a Druse's horn on her head. My dear madam, this is the kind of thing we go to see in museums. It is the old stock joke of the world."

By Jove how mad Mrs. Potiphar was! She rose from table, to the great dismay of Kurz Pacha, and I could only restrain her by reminding her that the Sennaar Minister had but an imperfect idea of our language, and that in Sennaar people probably said what they thought when they conversed.

"You'd better go to Sennaar, then, yourself, Mr. Potiphar," said my wife, as she smoothed her rumpled feathers.

"Pon my word, madam, it's my own opinion," replied I.

Kurz Pacha, who is a philosopher (of the Sennaar school), asks me if people have no ideas of their own in building houses. I answer, none, that I know of except that of getting the house built. The fact is, it is as much as Paul Potiphar can do, to make the money to erect his palatial residence, and then to keep it go

ing. There are a great many fine statues in my house, but I know nothing about them; I don't see why we should have such heathen images in reputable houses. But Mrs. P. says:

"Pooh! have you no love for the fine arts?"

There it is! It doesn't do not to love the fine arts; so Polly is continually cluttering up the halls and staircases with marble, and sending me heavy bills for the same.

When the house was ready, and my wife had purchased the furniture, she came and said to me:

"Now, my dear P., there is one thing we haven't thought of."

"What's that?"

"Pictures, you know, dear."

"What do you want pictures for?" growled I, and rather surlily, I am afraid.

"Why, to furnish the walls; what do you suppose we want pictures for?"

"I tell you Polly," said I, "that pictures are the most extravagant kind of furniture. Pshaw! a man rubs and dabbles a little upon a canvas two feet square, and then coolly asks three hundred dollars for it."

"Dear me, Pot," she answered, "I don't want home-made pictures. What an idea! Do you think I'd have pictures on my walls that were painted in this country?—No, my dear husband, let us have some choice specimens of the old masters. A landscape by Rayfel, for instance; or one of Angel's fruit pieces, or a cattle scene by Verynees, or a Madonna of Giddo's, or a boar-hunt of Hannibal Crackkey's."

What was the use of fighting against this sort of thing? I told her to have it her own way. Mrs. P. consulted Singe the pastry cook, who told her his cousin had just come out from Italy with a lot of the very finest pictures in the world, which he had bribed one of the Pope's guard to steal from the Vatican, and which he would sell at a bargain.

They hang on my walls now. They represent nothing in particular; but in certain lights, if you look very closely, you can easily recognize something in them that looks like a lump of something brown. There is one very ugly woman with a convulsive child in her arms, to which Mrs. P. directly takes all her visitors, and asks them to admire the beautiful Shay douver of Giddo's. When I go out to dinner with people that talk pictures and books, and that kind of thing, I don't like to seem behind, so I say, in a critical way, that Giddo was a good painter. None of them contradict me, and one day

when somebody asked, “Which of his pictures do you prefer?" I answered straight, "His Shay douver," and no more questions were asked.

They hang all about the house now. The Giddo is in the dining-room. I asked the Sennaar Minister if it wasn't odd to have a religious picture in the diningroom. He smiled, and said that it was perfectly proper if I liked it, and if the picture of such an ugly woman didn't take away my appetite.

"What difference does it make," said he, in the Sennaar manner, "it would be equally out of keeping with every other room in your house. My dear Potiphar, it is a perfectly unprincipled house, this of yours. If your mind were in the condition of your house, so ill-assorted, so confused, so overloaded with things that don't belong together, you would never make another cent. You have order, propriety, harmony, in your dealings with the Symmes's Hole Bore Co., and they are the secrets of your success. Why not have the same elements in your house? Why pitch every century, country, and fashion higgledy-piggledy into your parlors and dining-room? Have every thing you can get, in heaven's name, but have every thing in its place. If you are a plodding tradesman, knowing and caring nothing about pictures, or books, or statuary, or objets de vertu ; don't have them. Suppose your neighbor chooses to put them in his house. If he has them merely because he had the money to pay for them, he is the butt of every picture and book he owns.

"When I meet Mr. Croesus in Wallstreet, I respect him as I do a king in his palace, or a scholar in his study. He is master of the occasion. He commands like Nelson at the Nile. I, who am merely a diplomatist, skulk and hurry along, and if Mr. Croesus smiles, I inwardly thank him for his charity. Wall-street is Croesus's sphere, and all his powers play there perfectly. But when I meet him in his house, surrounded by objects of art, by the triumphs of a skill which he does not understand, and for which he cares nothing, of which, in fact, he seems afraid, because he knows any chance question about them would trip him up,-my feeling is very much changed. If I should ask him what or molu is, I don't believe he could answer, though his indignant or molu clock rang, indignant, from the mantel. But if I should say, "Invest me this thousand dollars," he would secure me eight per cent. It certainly isn't necessary to know what or molu is, nor to have any other objet de vertu but your wife. Then, why should you barricade

yourself behind all these things that you really cannot enjoy, because you don't understand? If you could not read Italian, you would be a fool to buy Dante, merely because you knew he was a great poet. And, in the same way, if you know nothing about matters of art, it is equally foolish for you to buy statues and pictures, although you hear on all sides, that, as Mrs. P. says, one must love art.

"As for learning from your own pictures, you know, perfectly well, that until you have some taste in the matter, you will be paying money for your pictures blindly, so that the only persons upon whom your display of art would make any impression, will be the very ones to see that you know nothing about it.

"In Sennaar, a man is literally 'the master of the house.' He isn't surrounded by what he does not understand; he is not obliged to talk book, and picture, when he knows nothing about these matters. He is not afraid of his parlor, and you feel instantly upon entering the house, the character of the master. Please, my dear Mr. Potiphar, survey your mansion and tell me what kind of man it indicates. If it does not proclaim (in your case) the President of the Patagonia Junction, a man shrewd, and hard, and solid, without taste or liberal cultivation, it is a painted deceiver. If it tries to insinuate by this chaotic profusion of rich and rare objects, that you are a cultivated, accomplished, tasteful, and generous man, it is a bad lie, because a transparent one. Why, my dear old Pot., the moment your servant opens the front door, a man of sense perceives the whole thing. You and Mrs. Potiphar are bullied by all the brilliancy you have conjured up. It is the old story of the fisherman and the genii. And your guests all see it. They are too wellbred to speak of it; but I come from Sennaar, where we do not lay so much stress upon that kind of good-breeding. Ms. Paul Potiphar, it is one thing to have plenty of money, and quite another, to know how to spend it."

Now, as I told him, this kind of talk may do very well in Sennaar, but it is absurd in a country like ours. How are

people to know that I'm rich unless I
show it? I'm sorry for it, but how shall
I help it, having Mrs. P. at hand?
"How about the library?" said she
one day.

"What library?" inquired I.
"Why, our library, of course."
"I haven't any."

"Do you mean to have such a house as this without a library?"

"Why," said I. plaintively, "I don't

read books-I never did, and I never shall; and I don't care any thing about them. Why should I have a library?" "Why, because it's part of a house like this."

"Mrs. P., are you fond of books?"

"No, not particularly. But one must have some regard to appearances. Suppose we are Hottentots, you don't want us to look so, do you?"

I thought that it was quite as barbarous to imprison a lot of books that we should never open, and that would stand in gilt upon the shelves, silently laughing us to scorn, as not to have them if we didn't want them. I proposed a compromise.

"Is it the looks of the thing, Mrs. P.?" said I.

"That's all," she answered. "Oh! well, I'll arrange it."

So I had my shelves built, and my old friends Matthews and Rider furnished me with complete sets of handsome gilt covers to all the books that no gentleman's library should be without, which I arranged, carefully, upon the shelves, and had the best-looking library in town. I locked 'em in, and the key is always lost when any body wants to take down a book. However, it was a good investment in leather, for it brings me in the reputation of a reading man and a patron of literature.

Mrs. P. is a religious woman—the Rev. Cream Cheese takes care of that— but only yesterday she proposed something to me that smells very strongly of candlesticks.

"Pot., I want a prie-dieu.”
"Pray-do what?" answered I.

"Stop, you wicked man. I say I want a kneeling-chair."

"A kneeling-chair!" I gasped, utterly befogged.

"A prie-dieu-a prie-dieu-to pray in, you know."

My Sennaar friend, who was at table, choked. When he recovered, and we were sipping the "blue seal," he told me that he thought Mrs. Potiphar in a priedieu was rather a more amusing idea than Giddo's Madonna in the dining

room.

"She will insist upon its being carved handsomely in walnut. She will not pray upon pine. It is a romantic, not a religious whim. She'll want a missal next ; vellum, or no prayers. This is piety of the 'Lady Alice' school. It belongs to a fine lady and a fine house precisely as your library does, and it will be precisely as genuine. Mrs. Potiphar in à prie-dieu is like that blue morocco Comus in your library. It is charming to look at, but

there's nothing in it. Let her have the prie-dieu by all means, and then begin to build a chapel. No gentleman's house should be without a chapel. You'll have to come to it, Potiphar. You'll have to hear Cream Cheese read morning prayers in a purple chasuble, que sais-je. You'll see religion made a part of the newest fashion in houses, as you already see literature and art, and with just as much reality and reason."

Privately, I am glad the Sennaar minister has been recalled. It's bad enough to be uncomfortable in your own house without knowing why; but to have a philosopher of the Sennaar school show you why you are so, is cutting it rather too fat. I am gradually getting resigned to my house. I've got one more struggle to go through next week in Mrs. Potiphar's musical party. The morning soirées are over for the season, and Mrs. P. begins to talk of the watering places. I am getting gradually resigned; but only gradually.

Oh! dear me, I wonder if this is the

"home, sweet home" business the girls used to sing about! Music does certainly alter cases. I can't quite get used to it. Last week I was one morning in the basement breakfast-room, and I heard an extra cried. I ran out of the area door -dear me !-before I thought what I was about, I emerged bareheaded from. under the steps, and ran a little way after the boy. I know it wasn't proper. I am sorry, very sorry. I am afraid Mrs. Croesus saw me; I know Mrs. Gnu told it all about that morning; and Mrs. Settum Downe called directly upon Mrs. Potiphar, to know if it were really true that I had lost my wits, as every body was saying. I don't know what Mrs. P. answered. I am sorry to have compromised her so. I went immediately and ordered a pray-do of the blackest walnut. My resignation is very gradual. Kurz Pacha says they put on gravestones in Sennaar three Latin words-do you know Latin? if you don't, come and borrow some of my books. The words are: ora pro me!

E ought to have a chemistry of men,

WE

but instead, our ignorance keeps us dependent upon such oracles as Shakspeare, Scott, Dickens, Hawthorne, and the poets who are free of their guild. We want an analysis of human nature for common use, something to help common judgment to the insight and knowledge of high genius-something to be discovered and revealed by the gifted, in such form that it can be clearly comprehended, and safely used, by the Million; as the mysteries of the material world have been put within the grasp and subjected to the uses of the common mind. Men might be divided, for instance, like electricity, into positive and negative. The analogy furnishes a helpful hint. Logic, also, could afford the aid of its correspondences—the absolute and the conditional lets in some light; and so, perhaps, by the time the whole circle of the sciences had contributed to the undertaking, the elements of the microcosmic human nature might be somewhat distinguished and defined.

Lacking technical terms sufficiently definite and significant, we must endeavor the delineation of the character in hand, in the roundabout method of detailed description.

General Ogle, then, was all that is

In

meant and suggested by the words, centric, positive, and absolute. He was like Emerson's representative men for the reason that, like them, he was not representative; he was an exceptional heroic character, as Napoleon, Cromwell, and Jackson were; that is, he owed his distinction to the qualities which distinguished him from every body else, or we never would have heard of either of them. the language of orator Philips, "he was a man without a model and without a shadow." Nature is liberal of her extemporaneous productions, but she took care to copyright him, and it is well known that she never issues more than one edition of her standard works; if for no other reason, because the type is worn out by the force of the first impression; and, if for any other reason, because copies mutually destroy each other's necessity, and. because reproductions in changed circumstances are absurdities.

General Ogle was not one of a litter. He was made on purpose, and his kind was complete in him. He was of that breed which leaves no heirs, and needs no successors. Out of time and place he would himself have been only an oddity, or, perhaps, a monster; but in his actual surroundings of men and things, there